Description

One Morning by Jessica Hagy

Hardcover – Tartarus Press – Aug 2020 – 244 pages

One Morning is a gothic novel that tells the story of Gour Borough, Pennsylvania via the subjective and interwoven perspectives of twelve women who live there.

A middle-aged taxidermist who indulges in arson.

An ailing hostage.

A mother who stopped searching for her lost child.

A disoriented shepherdess.

A feral tween huntress.

An exhausted wife with a secret bank account.

An innocent girl with a bounty on her head.

An untethered orphan.

A gleefully passive murderer.

An underemployed geologist.

A scheming hotel proprietor in a ghoulish costume.

A teenager with a dead pen pal.

Taking place over a single twelve hour time period, the book moves in real time as the characters’ lives intertwine, their fates soaked in and stained by the polluted waters of the long-abandoned coalmines that crumble below their town.

One Morning embodies the phrase, to sonder, that is, to realise that everyone around us leads lives as rich, haunting, and complex as our own.

Note: This is a smaller-format hardcover than the usual Tartarus hardcover, being approximately 5×7″.